There is a kebab caravan at a petrol station on Victoria Rd not far from the Bridge Hotel that does quite superb kebabs. I think it is strategically placed near the Bridge Hotel to snare late night drunken patrons either coming out of the Bridge, which is a 24 hour pub. I have only been to the caravan a few times, but all the patrons are either taxi drivers or drunks. That is a good sign.
We got kebabs for dinner the other night, and I decided to inspect the kebab to try and work out why it was so good. The answer was simple - after polishing it off, I looked into the kebab packet and there was not a spot of juice or lettuce or other kebab detritus lurking in the bottom of the bag. It was a dry, well wrapped kebab.
Now I know some people will find that offensive, and they believe that a kebab should drip and leak and shed bits of contents all over your pants, shirt, shoes and the floor. That's fine if you are plastered and it is 3am and you are walking home with no chance of catching a cab. However, if you are sober, hungry and it is only 8pm, then a drip free kebab is preferable - especially if you are driving your own car home.
I never believed that a kebab could be made drip free, but I think his secret is to cook the living be-jesus out of it on the toaster thingy, and to allow his lettuce and tomato to drain properly. I think most of the drippy stuff that you normally get is a result of watered down hummus or badly dried salad stuff. When I make a salad, I dice the tomatoes and squeeze out the seeds and water because I don't like a watery salad. I wonder if he does the same for his kebabs?
That being said, there is not a single decent kebab shop in the country. They also use that bloody meat on a stick concept which might make cooking easier, but it does not make for a great kebab. A beef kebab is always a bit foul as you end up with shavings of beef, and they always remind me of soggy wood shavings.
When I went through Greece about 15 years ago, I found myself in a market one day in a town somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I was well off the tourist trail. The buckets of EU money that have since flowed into the country were nowhere to be seen back then. The backcountry Greeks lived like, well, poor backcountry people anywhere. Donkeycarts were the order of the day, plus women in black with big bundles of firewood on their head.
A kebab in Greece is a much simpler affair than one over here. For starters, their idea of meat on a stick is actually to stick small lumps of meat onto sticks and cook them over a BBQ or grill - proper little kebabs. Yes, it takes a lot longer to cook than slicing pre-cooked meat off half a cow on a stick, but the wait is worth it. The condiments are simple - spiced yoghurt if I remember, and maybe a bit of tomato. Possibly big chunks of iceberg lettuce. They didn't have daytime cooking TV shows selling them lettuce shredders and the like, so they just tore up big chunks of lettuce by hand. A kebab was a pretty brutal affair - simple, but tasty. I ate a lot of them. They were good. As good as our local non-drip guy is, he is still essentially selling shit. It's a fib of a kebab. A lie. Think of what McDonalds has done to hamburgers, and then think about what the half a cow on a stick has done to the kebab industry. Ok, the kebab is now fast food, but it's not good food.
I want a proper fucking kebab, not the ersatz version that we are stuck with these days. And I won't mind if it drips.
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